Through the decades
Here’s the second part of our annual summer feature “Through the Decades”, taking advantage of the dearth of new movies at the cinema to go back a decade at a time, ending up in 1946 next Sunday.
1976
1976 facts and figures:
Top 5 Money-Makers (US):
Rocky
A Star is Born
King Kong
All the President’s Men
The Omen
Best Film Oscar: Rocky
Best Actor Oscar: Peter Finch, Network
Best Actress Oscar: Faye Dunaway, Network
Cannes Festival ‘Golden Palm’: Taxi Driver (US)
1976 is a poignant kind of year. A year before, Jaws had changed the box-office landscape. A year later, Star Wars would shake things up even more conclusively. Wedged between these two proto-blockbusters, world cinema seemed to falter slightly – though it still produced enough great films to fill our Top 10. Here it is, along with 15 other films that marked the year:
1. ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN. Malaise, paranoia – these were the watchwords of the mid-70s. Two years after Watergate comes ‘Watergate: The Movie’ starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein, the hacks who brought down a President; gripping and brilliantly-written, keeping up the tension even though everyone already knew how it ends. Best scene: meeting “Deep Throat” in a deserted parking-lot.
2. ILLUSTRIOUS CORPSES. Malaise, paranoia – these were the watchwords of the mid-70s. Two years before Aldo Moro comes another tale of political murders in Italy, with Lino Ventura as the cop investigating judge-killings only to find a never-ending web of deceit and corruption. One of the best paranoid conspiracy thrillers of the 70s.
3. ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13. Relentless synth score over the opening credits. A scene – the cold-blooded murder of a little girl – so disturbing it could never be made today. Then a police station under siege, invoking both Rio Bravo and Night of the Living Dead. Stark and scary – and so superior to the recent pallid remake it seems obscene just to mention them both in the same paragraph.
4. CARRIE. What a year for thrillers and chillers! Brian De Palma’s super-stylish tale of a telekinetic girl (Sissy Spacek) driven to destruction does indeed climax in a bloodbath – but it’s also about incipient sexuality, and the horror of a sensitive adolescent faced with her changing body. Starts in a locker-room, famously ends with a hand popping out of a grave. Gotcha!
5. STAY HUNGRY. Jeff Bridges looking for answers, finding Sally Field, hillbilly music and a young Arnold Schwarzenegger as an amiable bodybuilder. Charming, funny, loose, acerbic, downright inspirational. Best advice ever given in the history of movies: “It doesn’t matter what you do in Life, as long as you do something – and do it unsparingly…”
6. CRIA CUERVOS. Morbid little girl’s Spanish childhood, full of things dreamed-up and half-understood; listening to records, playing dress-up with one’s sisters – but also chatting to ghosts, and watching one’s mother as she writhes on her deathbed. Watchful 10-year-old Ana Torrent shines in dreamlike, luminous Carlos Saura drama.
7. BOUND FOR GLORY. David Carradine “has an ornery intransigence” as 30s folk singer Woody Guthrie, wrote critic Pauline Kael – but the real star is Haskell Wexler’s photography and the recreation of shanty-towns and squatters’ camps, plus of course Guthrie’s songs. A labour of love.
8. THE DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND. A Catholic seminary in 50s Australia, priests and boys struggling with celibacy, “puzzled and deeply disappointed by their own physicality” to quote Pauline Kael (again). Films about nasty boarding-schools are two a penny, but seldom as wise or fair-minded – or wryly funny – as this one.
9. TAXI DRIVER. “You talkin’ to me?” Probably the most famous film on this list, for the same reasons why The Sun regularly out-sells The Daily Telegraph. Martin Scorsese’s urban nightmare is lurid and sensational, but compellingly sleazy and superbly crafted. How could it not win the Best Music Oscar? Because this was the year of The Omen.
10. NETWORK. TV is the villain in hysterical, hyper-articulate, wonderfully-acted black comedy. All together now: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!!!!”.
15 OTHER MUST-SEE FILMS FROM 1976:
BUGSY MALONE. “Everybody wants that man / Bug-sy Malo-o-one…”
THE FRONT. Better Red than dead. Or unemployed.
IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES. In the realm of the censors.
THE INNOCENT. Classy period dramas were all the rage (Part 1).
THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE. Bizarre Cassavetes tomfoolery: “And if you have any complaints, we’ll throw you right out on your ass”.
THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH. It’s David Bowie – but not as we know him.
THE MARQUISE OF O. Classy period dramas were all the rage (Part 2).
MURDER BY DEATH. “Moose, moose, you imbecile!”
1900. Five hours of political class-conflict. But in a good way.
THE OMEN. He’s not the Antichrist, he’s a very naughty boy!
THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES. I still think Josey’s a daft name for a cowboy.
THE PINK PANTHER STRIKES AGAIN. “Does your dog baaht?”
ROCKY. Bet you they change the ending if it ever gets re-made.
SILENT MOVIE. Marcel Marceau says “Non!”.
THE TENANT. Roman Polanski dresses up in drag, jumps out a window. What was his problem?
1966
1966 facts and figures:
Top 5 Money-Makers (US):
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
A Man for all Seasons
The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming
Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N.
Georgy Girl
Best Film Oscar: A Man for all Seasons
Best Actor Oscar: Paul Scofield, A Man for all Seasons
Best Actress Oscar: Elizabeth Taylor, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Cannes Festival ‘Golden Palm’ (tie): A Man and a Woman (Fr) and Signore e Signori (It)
By 1966, it was clear that the world was in transition: London was “swinging”, the US was changing, Vietnam was a quagmire, and the Summer of Love was just around the corner. That sense of tumult is reflected in the year’s films – an eclectic bunch, led by a clutch of classics. Here’s our Top 10, plus 15 others that marked the year:
1. PERSONA. Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece is even better than people think. Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann (dutiful nurse and mysteriously mute patient) do indeed become one in that famous dissolve – but there’s also the avant-garde opening, nods to Vietnam and the Holocaust, plus Andersson’s amazing monologue about the boys on the beach, a scene of unsurpassed erotic delicacy. Rich, spellbinding, endlessly re-watchable.
2. SECONDS. Near-atonal music, a series of electronic plinks giving way to fiddle and church-organ; baroque photography, fish-eye lenses stretching out the faces. And that’s just the opening credits. Creepy, cerebral sci-fi with remarkable moments and one of the saddest shots in movies: a middle-aged kiss, jowly sagging bodies clinging to each other against the chill of encroaching Death.
3. THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY. Wah-waaah-wah … Ennio Morricone’s famous score over an epic, exuberant Western, the peak of the Leone-Eastwood trio. Best scene: the climax in the graveyard.
4. THE HAWKS AND THE SPARROWS. Another great score by Morricone (MVP of 1966) as doleful Toto and his gormless teenage son roam the back-roads of Italy in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s zany, politically-charged comedy – falling in with a troupe of dancers, helping push a car, having flashbacks to mediaeval times when they were monks speaking to the hawks and the sparrows. Did we mention there’s a talking crow? We have now. Did we mention the opening credits are sung? We have now.
5. MASCULINE FEMININE. Jean-Luc Godard meets French youth culture – “the children of
Marx and Coca-Cola” – taking satirical pot-shots at everything from US foreign policy to vapid beauty queens. Free-ranging, stimulating, finally quite sad: a film about trying to live for love in a world of consumers and materialists.
6. DEATH OF A BUREAUCRAT. 1966 – the year of the left-wing wacky comedy. Here’s another one, hailing from Cuba (before good ol’ Fidel clamped down on movies), mixing slapstick and surrealism as it skewers the choking bureaucracy of Cuban Communism. Very funny, and too little-known.
7. THE FORTUNE COOKIE. More dark comedy: Walter Matthau as ‘Whiplash Willie’, fast-talking shyster extraordinaire, with Jack Lemmon as his decent but weak brother-in-law. Harsh, sour, overpoweringly cynical. “Why don’t you kids go play on the freeway?”
8. THE PROFESSIONALS. “You bastard!” “Yes sir. In my case, an accident of birth. But you, sir … you’re a self-made man!” Terrific outdoor adventure, with the best tough-guy duo of the year: Lee Marvin and Burt Lancaster, growling and grinning respectively.
9. A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS. Paul Scofield as Sir Thomas More, refusing to compromise on matters of conscience – even if it means losing his head. “And when we die, and you are sent to heaven for doing your conscience, and I am sent to hell for not doing mine … will you come with me, ‘for fellowship’?”
10. AU HASARD, BALTHAZAR. Can a shot of a dying donkey surrounded by a flock of sheep be profound (and profoundly moving)? It can, and it is. Robert Bresson’s life of a saint – except that the saint has four legs and big pointy ears – refreshes the parts other films don’t even know about.
15 OTHER MUST-SEE FILMS FROM 1966:
ALFIE. What’s it all about?
BLOWUP. London swings, Antonioni thinks.
CHELSEA GIRLS. Andy Warhol and his gang. For 210 minutes. In split-screen. It could only be the 60s.
COME DRINK WITH ME. It’s not just kung-fu, it’s Art!
CUL-DE-SAC. Gangsters on an island. Then it gets weird.
FAHRENHEIT 451. Better than Fahrenheit 9/11.
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM. “He raped Thrace once, then again and again!”; “You mean he raped Thrace thrice?”
GEORGY GIRL. “The wildest thing to hit the world since the mini-skirt!”
GRAND PRIX. Formula One fan? Right this way, sir…
LA GUERRE EST FINIE. Non, elle n’est pas.
IT HAPPENED HERE. What if the Nazis had won WW2?
LORD LOVE A DUCK. A schoolgirl, a genie. Groovy!
A MAN AND A WOMAN. A racing driver, a script-girl. Glossy!
TORN CURTAIN. Alfred Hitchcock is 67.
WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF. “If you existed, I’d divorce you!”
Next week: 1956 and 1946.
